Tuesday, September 16

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 5, and I've re-arranged the Declarations area in Desire2Learn so the new week is on top. If you have not turned in your Week 4 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit, and Tuesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the Reading Diary that was due on Monday.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Class Schedule. I just wanted to remind everybody that the schedule for this class is up to you! The deadlines exist so that you do not fall behind, but there is no reason to let the deadlines dictate your schedule. The idea is that you can do all the work on the weekend, or you can create a M-W-F- schedule, or you can create a T-Th schedule... you can create ANY schedule that suits your needs best. If you do want to do assignments every day, then work a day AHEAD of the schedule (so, for example, you would do the Reading Diary A on Sunday, not Monday), and that way you'll have room to maneuver if anything unexpected comes up.Update: Someone asked for specific examples of how to re-arrange the class into a MWF or T-TH schedule, so I wrote that up here: Designing Your Class Schedule.

Storybook Stack. The Storybook stack is HUGE, as always during this week of the Introductions. If you turned in an assignment on Friday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. Please wait until you get comments back from me before you go on to the next assignment; I promise to get back to everyone by the end of the week or on Saturday morning at the latest!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Book Recommendation: The Writing on the Wall by Tom Standage. If you are interested in the history of written communication and its future, I highly recommend this very informative book, which also happens to be very entertaining too!

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is SHAWL, which comes to English via Urdu and Persian. For details, see this blog post. The image below shows President Barack Obama receiving a red shawl as a gift from Sri Narayanachar Digalakote, a Hindu priest from Maryland:

FREE Kindle eBook: Hitopadesha - The Book of Good Counsels translated by Edwin Arnold. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. The Hitopadesha is one of the famous and influential derivatives of the Panchatantra tradition; it was a favorite of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is If Jupiter hurled his thunderbolt as often as men sinned, he would soon be out of thunderbolts (a Latin proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. The words come from the Roman poet Ovid, whom some of you got to know earlier in the semester. And for those of you who study Latin, here are Ovid's words: Si, quotiens peccant homines, sua fulmina mittat / Iuppiter, exiguo tempore inermis erit.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Sita's test by fire, which is a detail in an image showing other events of the Ramayana.

Tuesday Event on Campus: There will be a symposium from 1PM - 5:30PM in the Community Room of Zarrow Hall, and then at 7:30PM there will be a public lecture by human trafficking activist Dr. Kevin Bales: Unlocking the Science of Slavery (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed, and you can check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.